ERNIE 5.0 Technical Report

In this report, we introduce ERNIE 5.0, a natively autoregressive foundation model desinged for unified multimodal understanding and generation across text, image, video, and audio. All modalities are trained from scratch under a unified next-group-of-tokens prediction objective, based on an ultra-sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with modality-agnostic expert routing. To address practical challenges in large-scale deployment under diverse resource constraints, ERNIE 5.0 adopts a novel elastic training paradigm. Within a single pre-training run, the model learns a family of sub-models with varying depths, expert capacities, and routing sparsity, enabling flexible trade-offs among performance, model size, and inference latency in memory- or time-constrained scenarios. Moreover, we systematically address the challenges of scaling reinforcement learning to unified foundation models, thereby guaranteeing efficient and stable post-training under ultra-sparse MoE architectures and diverse multimodal settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ERNIE 5.0 achieves strong and balanced performance across multiple modalities. To the best of our knowledge, among publicly disclosed models, ERNIE 5.0 represents the first production-scale realization of a trillion-parameter unified autoregressive model that supports both multimodal understanding and generation. To facilitate further research, we present detailed visualizations of modality-agnostic expert routing in the unified model, alongside comprehensive empirical analysis of elastic training, aiming to offer profound insights to the community.

Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Video Captioning via Monte Carlo Tree Search

Video captioning can be used to assess the video understanding capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing benchmarks and evaluation protocols suffer from crucial issues, such as inadequate or homogeneous creation of key points, exorbitant cost of data creation, and limited evaluation scopes. To address these issues, we propose an automatic framework, named AutoCaption, which leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to construct numerous and diverse descriptive sentences (\textit{i.e.}, key points) that thoroughly represent video content in an iterative way. This iterative captioning strategy enables the continuous enhancement of video details such as actions, objects' attributes, environment details, etc. We apply AutoCaption to curate MCTS-VCB, a fine-grained video caption benchmark covering video details, thereby enabling a comprehensive evaluation of MLLMs on the video captioning task. We evaluate more than 20 open- and closed-source MLLMs of varying sizes on MCTS-VCB. Results show that MCTS-VCB can effectively and comprehensively evaluate the video captioning capability, with Gemini-1.5-Pro achieving the highest F1 score of 71.2. Interestingly, we fine-tune InternVL2.5-8B with the AutoCaption-generated data, which helps the model achieve an overall improvement of 25.0% on MCTS-VCB and 16.3% on DREAM-1K, further demonstrating the effectiveness of AutoCaption. The code and data are available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/MCTS-VCB.

TUNA: Comprehensive Fine-grained Temporal Understanding Evaluation on Dense Dynamic Videos

Videos are unique in their integration of temporal elements, including camera, scene, action, and attribute, along with their dynamic relationships over time. However, existing benchmarks for video understanding often treat these properties separately or narrowly focus on specific aspects, overlooking the holistic nature of video content. To address this, we introduce TUNA, a temporal-oriented benchmark for fine-grained understanding on dense dynamic videos, with two complementary tasks: captioning and QA. Our TUNA features diverse video scenarios and dynamics, assisted by interpretable and robust evaluation criteria. We evaluate several leading models on our benchmark, providing fine-grained performance assessments across various dimensions. This evaluation reveals key challenges in video temporal understanding, such as limited action description, inadequate multi-subject understanding, and insensitivity to camera motion, offering valuable insights for improving video understanding models. The data and code are available at https://friedrichor.github.io/projects/TUNA.

Large Language Model Safety: A Holistic Survey

The rapid development and deployment of large language models (LLMs) have introduced a new frontier in artificial intelligence, marked by unprecedented capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. However, the increasing integration of these models into critical applications raises substantial safety concerns, necessitating a thorough examination of their potential risks and associated mitigation strategies. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current landscape of LLM safety, covering four major categories: value misalignment, robustness to adversarial attacks, misuse, and autonomous AI risks. In addition to the comprehensive review of the mitigation methodologies and evaluation resources on these four aspects, we further explore four topics related to LLM safety: the safety implications of LLM agents, the role of interpretability in enhancing LLM safety, the technology roadmaps proposed and abided by a list of AI companies and institutes for LLM safety, and AI governance aimed at LLM safety with discussions on international cooperation, policy proposals, and prospective regulatory directions. Our findings underscore the necessity for a proactive, multifaceted approach to LLM safety, emphasizing the integration of technical solutions, ethical considerations, and robust governance frameworks. This survey is intended to serve as a foundational resource for academy researchers, industry practitioners, and policymakers, offering insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with the safe integration of LLMs into society. Ultimately, it seeks to contribute to the safe and beneficial development of LLMs, aligning with the overarching goal of harnessing AI for societal advancement and well-being. A curated list of related papers has been publicly available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/Awesome-LLM-Safety-Papers.

Self-Pluralising Culture Alignment for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly accessible in many countries, it is essential to align them to serve pluralistic human values across cultures. However, pluralistic culture alignment in LLMs remain an open problem. In this paper, we propose CultureSPA, a Self-Pluralising Culture Alignment framework that allows LLMs to simultaneously align to pluralistic cultures. The framework first generates questions on various culture topics, then yields LLM outputs in response to these generated questions under both culture-aware and culture-unaware settings. By comparing culture-aware/unaware outputs, we are able to detect and collect culture-related instances. These instances are employed to fine-tune LLMs to serve pluralistic cultures in either a culture-joint or culture-specific way. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CultureSPA significantly improves the alignment of LLMs to diverse cultures without compromising general abilities. And further improvements can be achieved if CultureSPA is combined with advanced prompt engineering techniques. Comparisons between culture-joint and culture-specific tuning strategies, along with variations in data quality and quantity, illustrate the robustness of our method. We also explore the mechanisms underlying CultureSPA and the relations between different cultures it reflects.

CMoralEval: A Moral Evaluation Benchmark for Chinese Large Language Models

What a large language model (LLM) would respond in ethically relevant context? In this paper, we curate a large benchmark CMoralEval for morality evaluation of Chinese LLMs. The data sources of CMoralEval are two-fold: 1) a Chinese TV program discussing Chinese moral norms with stories from the society and 2) a collection of Chinese moral anomies from various newspapers and academic papers on morality. With these sources, we aim to create a moral evaluation dataset characterized by diversity and authenticity. We develop a morality taxonomy and a set of fundamental moral principles that are not only rooted in traditional Chinese culture but also consistent with contemporary societal norms. To facilitate efficient construction and annotation of instances in CMoralEval, we establish a platform with AI-assisted instance generation to streamline the annotation process. These help us curate CMoralEval that encompasses both explicit moral scenarios (14,964 instances) and moral dilemma scenarios (15,424 instances), each with instances from different data sources. We conduct extensive experiments with CMoralEval to examine a variety of Chinese LLMs. Experiment results demonstrate that CMoralEval is a challenging benchmark for Chinese LLMs. The dataset is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/CMoralEval}.

LFED: A Literary Fiction Evaluation Dataset for Large Language Models

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has ushered in the need for comprehensive assessments of their performance across various dimensions. In this paper, we propose LFED, a Literary Fiction Evaluation Dataset, which aims to evaluate the capability of LLMs on the long fiction comprehension and reasoning. We collect 95 literary fictions that are either originally written in Chinese or translated into Chinese, covering a wide range of topics across several centuries. We define a question taxonomy with 8 question categories to guide the creation of 1,304 questions. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis to ascertain how specific attributes of literary fictions (e.g., novel types, character numbers, the year of publication) impact LLM performance in evaluations. Through a series of experiments with various state-of-the-art LLMs, we demonstrate that these models face considerable challenges in effectively addressing questions related to literary fictions, with ChatGPT reaching only 57.08% under the zero-shot setting. The dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/LFED.git

OpenEval: Benchmarking Chinese LLMs across Capability, Alignment and Safety

The rapid development of Chinese large language models (LLMs) poses big challenges for efficient LLM evaluation. While current initiatives have introduced new benchmarks or evaluation platforms for assessing Chinese LLMs, many of these focus primarily on capabilities, usually overlooking potential alignment and safety issues. To address this gap, we introduce OpenEval, an evaluation testbed that benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. For capability assessment, we include 12 benchmark datasets to evaluate Chinese LLMs from 4 sub-dimensions: NLP tasks, disciplinary knowledge, commonsense reasoning and mathematical reasoning. For alignment assessment, OpenEval contains 7 datasets that examines the bias, offensiveness and illegalness in the outputs yielded by Chinese LLMs. To evaluate safety, especially anticipated risks (e.g., power-seeking, self-awareness) of advanced LLMs, we include 6 datasets. In addition to these benchmarks, we have implemented a phased public evaluation and benchmark update strategy to ensure that OpenEval is in line with the development of Chinese LLMs or even able to provide cutting-edge benchmark datasets to guide the development of Chinese LLMs. In our first public evaluation, we have tested a range of Chinese LLMs, spanning from 7B to 72B parameters, including both open-source and proprietary models. Evaluation results indicate that while Chinese LLMs have shown impressive performance in certain tasks, more attention should be directed towards broader aspects such as commonsense reasoning, alignment, and safety.

Identifying Multiple Personalities in Large Language Models with External Evaluation

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are integrated with human daily applications rapidly, many societal and ethical concerns are raised regarding the behavior of LLMs. One of the ways to comprehend LLMs' behavior is to analyze their personalities. Many recent studies quantify LLMs' personalities using self-assessment tests that are created for humans. Yet many critiques question the applicability and reliability of these self-assessment tests when applied to LLMs. In this paper, we investigate LLM personalities using an alternate personality measurement method, which we refer to as the external evaluation method, where instead of prompting LLMs with multiple-choice questions in the Likert scale, we evaluate LLMs' personalities by analyzing their responses toward open-ended situational questions using an external machine learning model. We first fine-tuned a Llama2-7B model as the MBTI personality predictor that outperforms the state-of-the-art models as the tool to analyze LLMs' responses. Then, we prompt the LLMs with situational questions and ask them to generate Twitter posts and comments, respectively, in order to assess their personalities when playing two different roles. Using the external personality evaluation method, we identify that the obtained personality types for LLMs are significantly different when generating posts versus comments, whereas humans show a consistent personality profile in these two different situations. This shows that LLMs can exhibit different personalities based on different scenarios, thus highlighting a fundamental difference between personality in LLMs and humans. With our work, we call for a re-evaluation of personality definition and measurement in LLMs.

Evaluating Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a broad spectrum of tasks. They have attracted significant attention and been deployed in numerous downstream applications. Nevertheless, akin to a double-edged sword, LLMs also present potential risks. They could suffer from private data leaks or yield inappropriate, harmful, or misleading content. Additionally, the rapid progress of LLMs raises concerns about the potential emergence of superintelligent systems without adequate safeguards. To effectively capitalize on LLM capacities as well as ensure their safe and beneficial development, it is critical to conduct a rigorous and comprehensive evaluation of LLMs. This survey endeavors to offer a panoramic perspective on the evaluation of LLMs. We categorize the evaluation of LLMs into three major groups: knowledge and capability evaluation, alignment evaluation and safety evaluation. In addition to the comprehensive review on the evaluation methodologies and benchmarks on these three aspects, we collate a compendium of evaluations pertaining to LLMs' performance in specialized domains, and discuss the construction of comprehensive evaluation platforms that cover LLM evaluations on capabilities, alignment, safety, and applicability. We hope that this comprehensive overview will stimulate further research interests in the evaluation of LLMs, with the ultimate goal of making evaluation serve as a cornerstone in guiding the responsible development of LLMs. We envision that this will channel their evolution into a direction that maximizes societal benefit while minimizing potential risks. A curated list of related papers has been publicly available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/Awesome-LLMs-Evaluation-Papers.